Meeting 8: Secrets

Meeting 8

 

 

Tonight's Topic - Secrets

AL stands for Alcoholics' Loved Ones and is a meeting for anyone who is, or has been, affected by someone else's drinking, regardless of whether the person is still drinking or not.

MACK says,

"Good Evening everybody, shall we make a start with tonight's meeting ?"

Everyone quietens down.

"For any newcomers here this evening, my name is Mack and I am a very grateful member of AL. I am chairing this meeting tonight.

Tonight's meeting is a Top Table meeting, which for any newcomers here simply means we have 2 main speakers, Olga and Eddie, who have volunteered to share their story on tonight's topic.

So I will read the suggested opening:

We would like to welcome you to this AL Top Table meeting.

The AL meeting is a group of relatives and friends of alcoholics who share their experience, strength and hope in order to solve their common problems. We believe alcoholism is an illness which affects the whole family and that changed attitudes can aid recovery for everyone.

Can I remind everyone that this is an anonymous group and we use first names only. Anonymity is one of the key principles we adhere to in the group. You need not tell us who you are, where you live, where you work, what you do - absolutely nothing about your personal details at all if you don't want to.

There are 15 of us here tonight but the numbers vary each week and sometimes there are more of us and sometimes less. You don't have to come every meeting but we do suggest you attend as regularly as you can if you want to benefit from what is on offer in this room. Our only purpose is to share our experiences, strength and hope to help ourselves and each other to gain some serenity because our lives have been negatively affected by an alcoholic dependent person.

So, without further ado I will pass you all over to Alice who has volunteered to read out the 12 Steps of our Programme for us."

 

ALICE

"Step 1: We admitted we were powerless over the problem drinker and that our own lives had become unmanageable.

Step 2: We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to serenity.

Step 3: We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of a power greater than ourselves (HP).

Step 4: We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

Step 5: We admitted to our HP, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

Step 6: We were entirely ready to have our HP remove all these defects of character.

Step 7: We humbly asked our HP to remove our shortcomings.

Step 8: We made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.

Step 9: We made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

Step 10: We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong we promptly admitted it.

Step 11: We sought through reflection and meditation to improve our conscious contact with our HP, seeking only knowledge of our HP's will for us and the power to carry that out.

Step 12: Having had an emotional or spiritual awakening as the result of applying these Steps, we tried to carry this message to others and to practice these principles in all our affairs."

 

MACK

"Thank You Alice.
Can I just say to any newcomers here tonight that you probably didn't understand a word of the 12 Steps which Alice has just read out but if you keep coming back you will soon start to feel the benefit of  working this 12 Step programme the same as we all have who are here tonight.
So ,I will now ask Eddie to share his experience, strength and hope with us" -

Eddie is both a recovering alcoholic himself (sober for over 20 years) and a member of AL because he is married to Sarah who is also a recovering alcoholic but who doesn't attend AL meetings herself.

EDDIE

"Thanks Mack, and thanks everyone for being here tonight, it's lovely to see you all.
Well ! the dreaded topic of Secrets which is probably an alcoholic's worst nightmare. There is a saying that 'we are only as sick as our secrets' and I can certainly relate to that. I know that secrets were one of my worst nightmares when I was drinking and I would say it contributed significantly to driving my drinking even harder than it would have been because my secrets  kept coming back to haunt me.

For me a secret is something I know but I don't want you to know. As far as I'm concerned there are things that I know about me and my behaviours that I do not want you to know and there are things that I know about other people which it's not my business to tell you about. If they want to tell you then that is up to them.

In my drinking days I was not in charge of my thinking at all and I found myself behaving in ways which I would not normally have behaved. I was a liar, a cheat and an emotional thief. I can now admit that I did dispicable, dark and awful things and many of these things, even in my alcoholic drinking days made me feel deeply ashamed and very guilty. It was the shame and guilt which fuelled my drinking even further because I needed to have something to take these horrible feelings away.

Looking back I would say my drinking started because my life was so unbearabe for me and if I had to say why it was so unbearable, I can only say I think it was because I simply didn't know how to do Life! I felt I could never get it right. Life and how to live it was a complete mystery to me. I would look around at the rest of the world going by and in my distorted thinking I believed that everyone else had sussed the magical formula that leads to a happy life and I had somehow missed the class where this magic formula had been given out. The result was I felt as if everyone else had left me behind years ago and I felt stupid and inept and left to float on a sinking raft in deep water alone! It was an intensely lonely feeling but I also felt enormous shame and guilt about being bottom of the 'Life class' so to speak and just ended up mimicing other people in order to fit in but the whole time I knew I was just being a big fake and that at any moment my secret could be discovered and I would be a laughing stock. So that was my first terrible secret, acting as if I was larger than life because I was just a cardboard cut-out of the best bits of others I had learned to mimic, how mad is that ! I felt I had no life of my own and nothing to contribute to the world which would be of any use to anyone. I would have rather died than admit any of this to anyone. I especially couldn't reveal my secret fake existence to my nearest and dearest because I felt they expected so much from me and I could never match up to what I perceived as their enormous expectations of me. I now know most of that perfectionism was really only in my own head and others had no idea that I felt they were causing me so much pressure and pain.

As the years rolled by my secret mimicing and pretence became such a heavy burden to me I started drinking more and more to drowned out my horrible feelings. But it became a vicious circle because I drank to get rid of the awful feelings of being a fake and not fitting in but then my behaviour when drunk got me into another set of problems which brought their own shame and this stacked up with my original source of shame. As they say 'It was heavy man'!

So you can see how my thinking had become ridiculously chaotic because I was living Life the wrong way but I didn't know the magical formula of the right way and so I was again lost and didn't have the foggiest idea of how to get out of it. So hey! I just drank another bottle of vodka and that took all the unsolvable problems whirling around in my head away but only for a while and as I started to sober up the problems would come back and because they were problems I could never work out an answer to I just continued on the Merry Go Round of chaotic thinking and drinking.

Did anyone understand any of that because I'm not sure I even did !

He laughs and the audience laugh along with him.

Wow, I'm starting to feel dizzy even talking about it to you !

Thankfully, because I got myself into AA and was given a magic formula for Living, so to speak, I can sit here now, 20 years sober and tell you all about it and we can laugh about it together. But it was certainly no laughing matter for anybody when it was all going on.

Now I have come through the other side of the mess I can't believe how tightly I had clung on to my distorted thinking before I found the help of the heroes who had walked this journey before me. In AA they didn't ask me what I thought in fact they knew only too well about my crazy thinking because they had all had it themselves before they had found help in AA. It was a great relief to me not to have to explain anything to them - they already knew it all. As they say 'They had been there, done that, got the tee-shirt...' I could just sit quietly and listen and learn and that's when my life started turning around for the better.

In AA I got to grips with the 12 Step programme and members used to talk in hushed tones about Step 4 and more particularly about Step 5 because it requires us to do a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves and then admit it to someone else, that was like a hammer-blow to my head. It was then that I became aware that all of this secretive stuff had to come out and an all consuming fear gripped me. Thankfully however, I stuck with it and didn't let it stop me from plodding on with my journey to sobriety but I did keep putting it off. It was a case of yes I will do it - but not YET !
When I finally did get around to reaching my Step 5 and admitted everything to myself, my HP and my sponsor I had to trust that everything I revealed would never be divulged to anyone else and so far I haven't had reason to regret it.

All the secrets, the lies, the half-truths I had carried around with me came out and afterwards I could feel a huge burden just drifting away from me. One of my hurdles was I did believe in a Higher Power and I knew 'it' knew all about this stuff  that I had said and done and that's why I felt so guilty. It was admitting it all to myself which was the big breakthrough because for a very long time I didn't want to admit it to myself. It took me years to build up the confidence and courage to look at all this stuff about myself and when I finally did I realised it wasn't so bad anyway. It was a mountain but I had made it into a huge mountain but by following the 12 Steps I was able to look at it all with a different perspective and it became more manageable for me to cope with. So I feel as if I was given the opportunity to wipe my slate clean and I took that opportunity.

Today, I know that if I slip back into secrets and lies it can only be my own fault because I am not working my programme in an honest and truthful way. Step 10 tells me to wipe my slate clean on a continuous basis and I do that every night before going to sleep because I strongly believe that secrets, deception and lies are the alcoholics biggest enemy and if I fall back into that way of life I know it will probably lead to me 'picking up again' and returning to the bottle to escape the shame and bad feelings. I don't want secrets to keep me sick today so make sure I don't carry any around with me. Even my wife knows everything that I shared with my sponsor when I did my Step 5 and I wanted her to know about it. So that was another great doorway I walked through because now I never have to keep things from her and I can be totally relaxed and open with her. Was I wise to tell her my secrets ? well yes because it's certainly made my life a lot easier because keeping secrets is such hard work because I had to be constantly thinking who I had told what to and so it went on until it just became too difficult and I wanted to escape into oblivion using booze.

Now what you see is very much what you get. The fakery and pretense has gone and I now know I'm an OK person just as I am. I'm not exceptional or special but neither as I the pits of humanity. I am just an ordinary bloke trying to do the best I can and that's Okay today. I can just be me, for better or worse. I accept myself now and if others don't well that's their problem not mine. On the whole I don't tell lies and on the few occasions when my wife tells me not to divulge something I tell her plainly, I won't lie, and I won't because I want my life to be straight and honest today. So I will just leave it at that thank you .

GROUP TOGETHER

"Thanks Eddie".

 

MACK

Thanks very much for you share Eddie, I'm sure it will help to give those of us in the room an insight into how at least one alcoholic thinks and how 'Changed attitudes can aid recovery'and they certainly have in your case.
So now I will hand you over to Olga for her share.

 

Olga is a regular attender of  AL meetings. She is now a single-parent and is bringing up her two daughters alone since her and her alcoholic husband divorced.

 

OLGA

"Thanks Mack, and can I just say what a privilege it is to be asked to share at a Top Table meeting so I only hope it will be of benefit to some of you. I never prepare any written notes or  aide memoir when I do my shares because I want to speak from my heart and speak my truth about how I have experienced alcoholism in my married life and how it has impacted on my whole family. I may even repeat myself a few times but this is just because the intensity of the emotions surrounding some events are so overwhelming that I need to get them out again and again  for as long as it takes and sometimes it can take me a long, long time to let go of things.

If anyone had said to me when I was with my ex that I kept secrets I would have denied it and said NO absolutely not, I am not that kind of person because I always saw myself as being a really upfront and straightforward person but now looking back on things with the benefit of hindsight  I realise I might have started off having very few secrets, in fact, I was quite an open-book but the longer I spent in the alcoholic environment the more secretive I gradually became and this was brought about because of my growing shame about the turn my life had taken.

I was terrified that people were going to find out that my husband was an alcoholic and there would be this terrible stigma against not only him but the rest of the family too. I also thought it was going to be a short-term thing and he was going to get over it and I was probably thinking it would be less baggage for him or us to have when this blip passed.

I'm ashamed to say that as the time went on and the drinking showed no signs of abating I said some very nasty and hurtful things to my husband which I now realise I had no right to say at all. I didn't understand the illness of alcoholism at that time and I blamed him for it. I couldn't empathise with his battle against the bottle because I didn't have that problem myself. Thankfully, coming along to these meetings has brought me back to my own sanity and I am a much more informed person now. But in the early days my emotions towards him just spiralled out of control and I only had one hat - an angry hat- which I wore for most of the day. I treated him like dirt on my shoe and for a long time I kept up my own atrocious behaviour towards him a secret because I had huge regrets about it further down the line.

I became so ashamed of the alcoholic's behaviour and found most social interactions with him very embarrassing. However, after any upsetting behaviour I would rant and rave and he would 'go out for a walk' come back and act as if nothing had happened.

No amount of questioning on my part could engage him in any sort of discussion and he controlled by remaining silent, disregarding any of my demands to talk about the situation. I had no idea how to resolve his adamant  refusal to verbally communicate. I now know this was passive-aggressive behaviour and he left me no where to go with his refusal to discuss anything. My way of coping with his stony silences was just to  brush any unpleasant event under the carpet and sort of pretend it had never happened because I didn't want to live in a constantly hostile home.  I was really just putting up with unacceptable behaviour to keep the peace. However, any serenity lasted just long enough for me to gain enough strength to deal with the next catastrophe he caused. This addictive urge for alcohol had hold of him and I became addicted to trying to stop him from drinking. So we both ended up being addicts really.

I thought I was being very successful in 'keeping up appearances' but really I can see now that  I was really just trying to hide it from myself and convince myself that things weren't as bad as they actually were. I justified my lies by telling myself it was all for the best. So needless to say nothing ever improved. I also found myself becoming much more isolated because I was adapting to that chaotic lifestyle and it made me avoid well functioning people. I managed one catastrophe at a time and just got through each day.

Now of course, only years later, I can stand back and see the whole recurring pattern of decline and how I was heading down a steep cliff at gathering speed almost from the very beginning but I had got myself so drawn into that 'alcoholic drama' that it was very difficult to find my way out of it once I had gone past a certain point of normality. I became a very plausible liar because I got lots of practise at it. The amount of times I rang his job and told them he wasn't going in because he had flu or stomach problems or headaches, anything you can think of just to cover for his absences. He did end up getting sacked in the end regardless of all my lying.

Anyway, after living such a secretive life for so long I got to the stage where I just didn't mix with anyone and the few acquaintances I knew I kept very much at arm's length. I wasn't close to anyone and felt very lonely which made me want to stay in the marriage because it was all I had left in my life.

The only people who knew the truth really were my children and that was an awful burden for them to carry. They were drawn into that secrecy and it badly affected their ability to form any genuine friendships outside of the home. They were forever covering up the family's secrets with lies and more lies. They didn't want to talk to their friends about what was going on in the house and I suppose  it just became too much of an ordeal for them to keep up the sham so everyone eventually drifted away and the family isolation became even worse. No one was invited into the house and it seemed to have a dark cloud all of it's own. The very walls seemed to have soaked up the misery of us all. Secrets can really tear a family apart. Although we all lived in the same house we seemed to all live separate lives. We avoided each other as much as we could.

It was not a healthy way for children to live and the ramifications are still impacting on them today in a  number of painful ways.

How long it will take for my daughters to blossom into the happy and fulfilled people they deserve to be  I don't know but I do know I will never burden them with my responsibilities again because I just ended up causing them even more pain to deal with.

There are still things I would never tell anyone about what my husband has done because I don't want to lower his reputation any further than it already is. Also I don't want my children to be hurt any more than they already have been.

So I am trying to live my life now without having any secrets, especially between my self and my daughters.

I am trying to change those habits I practised for so many years and I am trying to live a more honest life, honest with both myself and with other people because it really was a toxic and unhappy way to live. On a positive note, I feel now that I have been through it, I can share my experiences and help others to come through it as well. I've learned only too well how living with alcoholism can steal not only the alcoholic's life away but it also steal's away the life of partners, children and anyone around them who cares for the alcoholic. I feel I have been strengthened by this experience but it has taken me a long time to reach this point of gaining back control of my life.

Today I feel a 'healthy me' is the best gift I can give to my family and friends -it's also the best gift I can give to myself ! When I talk about health, I'm not just talking about physical health which of course is of major importance but I am also talking about emotional, mental and spiritual health. My ex was so insecure and constantly needed pats on the back to just make it through the day and it gradually eroded my own emotional stability. Having to constantly guess what kind of mood he was going to be on 'walking on egg-shells' so as not to set him off again. The stress and anxiety was too, too much for all of us living under the same roof. I feel so many things were lost, for instance, my children's childhoods were lost. I feel my daughter's largely missed out on a childhood because they had to worry as children, they had to be afraid as children and they didn't get to have the emotional stability that other children had and so they didn't learn the normal lessons they needed to grow-up into well-rounded young adults. Their emotional and spiritual development was interrupted so I worry that they will not know how to go out into the world with their heads held high and know who they are and have the best life I know they deserve. I don't want them to live a life of feeling as if they are just making it through everyday. I don't want them to be petrified and afraid of life. My kids have always been and still are a blessing to me and I am trying to live the very best life I can live now for them and for me. We have 'risen from the flames' and we will continue to do so by following the 12 Step programme.

It's funny really because my dad used to say I was so gullible people could 'see me coming'! I was such a candid, straight talking person, probably too straight-forward actually but I really hadn't realised that some people can be very manipulative and my ex was certainly a master manipulator and I was just drawn into that in a very gullible and ignorant way. But now I am being restored back to being the person I was before alcoholism up-ended my life and when tough times do come along I put my trust in the group and the programme to help me through.

So my time in AL has really all been about learning how to get out of that tangled web of secrets and lies which I had got  into and thankfully with the help and support I get from you all I've managed to make tremendous progress and I'd just like to thank you all for that.

Thank you.

 

MACK

"Thank You both Eddie and Olga for your very honest shares of your experiences.

So it just remains for me to say that there are no dues for membership but we do ask you to make a contribution of whatever you can afford to cover our costs for tea, coffee and rent. If you cannot afford anything that is Okay too.

Josh, can I ask you to read the suggested closing to close our meeting please ?"

 

JOSH

 

"In closing, I would like to say that the opinions expressed here were strictly those of the person who gave them. Take what you liked and leave the rest. A few words to those of you who haven't been with us long: whatever your problems, there are those amongst us who have had them too. If you try to keep an open mind, you will find help. You will come to realise that there is no situation too difficult to be bettered and no unhappiness too great to be lessened.
Will all those who care to join me in closing our meeting?"

 

Everyone stands and joins hands in a circle.

 

GROUP TOGETHER

"Grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change.

The Courage to change the things I can and

The Wisdom to know the difference.

 

Same time, Same Place, Keep coming back, it works if you work it"